


Odalisque in Red

by dorothy_notgale and Tromperie (dorothy_notgale)



Series: To Die as Lovers May [7]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: And all that entails, Cisswap, F/F, Rule 63, Sexual Violence, discussion of armand's past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 08:16:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8320594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale%20and%20Tromperie
Summary: After Danny leaves the room in "Pretty Woman," Armida and Maria continue on. It's not like old times; there's been too much change for all that.But is certainly is something.





	

**ARMIDA POV**

 

The doors of Maria’s penthouse suite glided on hinges so well-oiled that even Danny's exit made barely a whisper, though Armida still heard it. Sensed it, somehow, perhaps through the blood that remained in her mouth.

Maria continued taking her pleasure, doing that thing she'd said Armida was lucky in being too young for when she lived.

"I cannot taste you without blood, my girl, but with the courses would come such danger," Maria had told her again and again, fingers pressing into the holes between Armida's legs, lips at her neck promising soon, soon, that sweet secret kiss. "For now you are safe, for all your foolishness--unless--" She'd always twist, here, for emphasis, wringing a cry from Armida's throat, "Unless you've been hiding things from me. Perhaps you've gone and gotten yourself with child already, hmm?"

Armida would weep and swear, feeling to her core the threatened withdrawal of the love for which she lived.

"You must tell me true, disobedient girl," her Mistress had said once. "Suppose I were to make you like me, all unknowing, and your belly held a monster trapped, forever growing?"*

She'd pushed at that, only just, saying it mustn't be possible. The baby would die, surely. 

"Are you certain?" Maria always sounded certain. "Have you grown so much wiser in the ways of the world than I, little one?" And she drew away, claiming she had no more to teach, until Armida broke and begged forgiveness.

She'd lived for Maria's approval, and whatever scant secrets she'd hidden for herself would come spilling out without fail. 

Their reunion seemed to have broken those barriers, made entendres into something new. And yet Maria still called her by her old name, professed her to be worth protecting. Was still stronger, even with all the tricks Armida had learned in her long years.

She was no fool--she knew the way Danny had gone still, alien and too intent for her new death. But it had been worth it, and she had been there. It was as good as it could have been. And still. Still Danny had left, and Armida was...

She sat up, disrupting the scene. It was over. Everything was over. "Thank you, Maria." Her hair stuck to her face, her body streaked with blood and still humming with ignored arousal. "Danny will be better for your protection."

“Hmm. And what has that to do with us, my girl?” Maria raised an eyebrow and wiped her chin, failing to do anything but smear the blood around. “The favor you asked was well and good, but was it not based in our love?”

"You left me to my devices for five hundred years. I see no reason you shouldn't continue to do so." 

"So you still seek to punish me after all these years." Maria’s fingers slid gently along the inside of Armida's thigh, coming away wet.  "And yourself, as well." 

She snorted, earning a frown. Rude, inexcusably rude, but she'd never thought of her body as anything more than a tool. Her best bargaining chip. Pleasure, rare though it was, gave no reason to be led. "Your love is at your convenience."

"On the contrary, pet. It is often quite inconvenient."  Her touch was light as a mirage, leaving tingling uncertainty along Armida's skin that disguised itself as longing. "Such havoc you caused in my absence."

“I did only what I needed to survive.” Any havoc wreaked was surely the province of Maria’s newer favorite, Lestat who turned all the world upside down to her pleasure.

“Mmm. As is your nature, unfortunate though it is. But weaker girls are ever so…” Maria trailed off, tilting her head and examining the crusted red crescents on Armida’s buttocks, over healed fingernail cuts. “Am I truly to see tonight as nothing more than a return to form, after all I did to make you more than that?”

The light slaps and strong squeeze of Danny’s hands had been helpful, proof undeniable of her  _ presence _ after so long with their minds sealed separate. Pain of that sort had never been their game, but Armida wondered whether it should have been.

Perhaps Danny would not have left, nor begun her affair with Louisa, had Armida been reassuring her properly.

(Louisa and pain were another moment, another thought. Maybe Danny was--)

“Armida.” Maria’s strike was a mere love tap, just to get her attention. She’d been switched for less, back in Venice. “Do not  _ ignore _ me, pretty child.”

"I'm no longer your apprentice." She was the executioner, the coven mistress, the oldest of them all. And she was beholden to--

A strong hand gripped the back of her neck as she started to rise, pulling her off balance until she lay across Maria's knee, her cheek pressed to the hearth-warmed floor. "The song you sang so prettily for Miss Pointe du Lac doesn't reach me, young one. Can you speak so confidently of your strength without it?"

"Let me up," she bristled, only succeeding in looking more the fool as she squirmed in Maria's grip like an errant pup. 

"Behave, or you'll soon regret it." 

"N--" there was pressure, a snap, and Armida felt numbness spread through her below the neck. Her arms fell, useless, the whole of her dead weight against her former mistress. "What," she struggled to hold her composure, "what is the point in this display? I'll have healed within the hour, and you'll find I won't be endeared."

"It would be little more than a diversion for me to keep you like this until the sun rose." Maria stroked her hair. "To heal you to feel pain or pleasure only where I desired you to do so. You've forgotten your limits, Amanda. You know what happens to such vampires."

She knew, for it had been she to choose. She had given the orders, time and again, when they were too dangerous or filled with pain. Fire, or hunger, or sunlight; all the cures their kind could handle. Vampires in pain were infectious; they spread it to their fellows mind-to-mind, blood-to-blood. (That, more than anything, had been reason to destroy the coven at the Theater when Louisa came calling. Armida had had a duty, and had made a choice, the opposite of the one Nicola had represented.)

“I know my limits,” she said bitterly, for she was so bitter. So many limits, all in how far she could and couldn’t move others’ hearts and minds.

“We shall see.”

She wondered what exactly Maria was doing; the smell of blood rose, and occasionally sparks of familiar pleasure made it clear that her veins were being drawn upon, but it was…distant. Strangely pleasant; like being divorced from that part of her that was the source of such confusion. She could simply drift, eyes intent on the marble floor and then, after a dizzying roll, the textured plaster ceiling.

And then, gradually, she began to feel again--at first a tingle, then an itch. Then stinging, burning, and wetness over her back and buttocks and legs, so sensitive that the movement of circulating air was discernable as coldness.

She forced herself to lay still, counting blinks and small, controlled breaths through her nose. Pain was a color. Pain was golden and red and blooming across the ceiling, hers to master and direct. Pain was--   
Unbearable as it rolled over her in a wave, now sharp as muscle and skin tried to knit themselves back together. Control danced before her and then slipped from her grasp, freeing a cry from her lips as it went. 

"You dislike pain," Maria told her. Reminded. Instructed. "And yet you so often ask for it. Left to your devices, no vampires would walk free of your judgment. But who stands as your judge, my child?"   
Louisa, with her dull disinterest. Santiago, now dead and drifting from the fire. Lestat, with her brilliance and indifference, and her beautiful no-longer-mortal, her one and only fledgling.    
"Answer me, Armida." The shock of that name from those lips did its job, jerking her attention to the source of the sound in spite of itself.

_ ”Answer me, Louisa,” she’d said time and again, doing her best to keep the attention of one slipping, slipping-- _

_ “Answer me, Danny,” when Danny’s mind was reeling from her chemicals and thoughts and she could not think to speak-- _

_ “Answer me, Nicola--Elias--Lauren--” _

“Whoever will have me,” she hissed, limbs shot through with electricity and still clumsy as she tried to move them. “You abdicated that duty long centuries ago.”

She shook like one palsied as she rose up onto hands and knees; Maria watched with detached fascination before reaching out a bloody hand and so-gently knocking Armida back down onto her side.

"And yet you reject me, after so long." Maria's hand stroked the length of Armida's form, "You claim you no longer feel. But see." Her thumb dug under the surface of a cut, and Armida's body spasmed.    
Long centuries. Centuries in the dark, learning to build walls and fortresses and moats around her mind, to paralyze enemies with fear at the mere thought of her before they even came within sight of her frail form. They walked like clockwork, and when she studied them she understood. She was her eyes, and her mind, and they were the images she whispered to them. 

"Who is waiting for you, if you leave this room?" Maria asked.

Maria didn't hear her mind. Maria knew her body completely, alive and dead, and reached through it. She couldn't touch her mind. She didn't see, she didn't care that she couldn't see. 

"You know." She meant Danny, her whole Night Island, but the words sounded small instead.

“I do.” Maria’s pale eyes grew distant, filmy, and she stroked Armida almost absently while listening to whatever mind in the distance had caught her interest. “I know your fledgling has taken her vulgar manners to one who appreciates them.”

The hands on her body were gentle now, avoiding the cuts to the skin as others were laid upon her mind.

“I know that your old lover wastes herself away like a vagrant, because you lacked a gentle hand with her fragility. I know that Lestat refused you even in dreams, throwing you from the very imagined tower you spun.

“I know that I made you for my own, and that if you can find no other to claim you, it’s because you are meant for me.”

All she had to say was "love me." She could make it stop, hide in those arms that had killed her, saved her, owned her in every sense. She only had to go along as she had so often. 

She was silent. 

Maria sighed, her touch lifting, and Armida told herself she didn't lean towards its absence. "It's a shame," she said as she stood. Well-kempt, always, even when she was furious. "Mortals these days have such creative minds, freed from the gods that frightened them. The devices they invent are ingenious." Her hands folded delicately behind her back. "Did you tell Lestat how it pleased you when she beat you?" 

(Of course she knew, when the memory could only have come from Lestat herself).

To be grabbed, thrown to the ground, made to bleed and feel the wrath of another was almost  _ better _ than the dreams Armida had wrapped Lestat in, because it had been so real. There had been a presence to Lestat’s weight, and Armida had yielded to it. But after--Lestat had not availed herself of those cuts, those wounds she’d made. Armida had been left unclaimed yet again.

“It was not the beating I enjoyed,” she said simply, rising with effort to her knees again. Her hair fell in strings about her face, sticky and mussed with blood. “It was never the beatings.”

Even when Armida  _ had _ kept women herself, she had not been given to such things, and only now did she consider that difference.

"Oh?" Those cold hands were holding her steady, soothing with such easy power as if the pain had never happened. "All your talk about how we never change." 

If she closed her eyes that coolness became her whole world, experience narrowing to the little points of contact. She moaned, soft. 

"Determined at last to stand on your own." Maria chuckled, voice dark. "I am proud of you, my child."    
And the touch was gone, the pain redoubled in comparison to that stable salvation. She fell to her hands and knees, strength gone. 

"If that's your decision," Maria was saying, "I oughtn't keep you."

Her dress, her pretty dress made to showcase her charms, fell to the carpet beside her. It was stained already.

(She’d always liked clothing like that; things that left her legs visible, that made mortals notice but not comment, their eyes flickering over her and darting away. It made hunting easy, when they were hungry and ashamed. Danny hated such things, though; never appreciated her own beauty, nor the admiration of others.)

She heard water running somewhere else in the suite, and stumbled towards where Maria lay back in a marbled tub, jets sending bubbles up to wreath her milky form. With blue eyes closed and silver-blonde hair slicked back, she looked like one who had never been human, but carven from alabaster. All smooth hairless white.

Armida knew she was being listened to as she stood and looked, though only in the mundane sense. She knew she could still go there, lower herself into that water and allow herself to be used again by the hands that had sculpted her.

She would have her hair cleaned, with her head held under the water for long minutes as she mastered not breathing. As she used her mouth on pale folds to redeem herself. She would be born again from those waters and that blood, if only she gave in.

Instead she walked over to the mirror and picked up a comb, unasked, to run through her hair.

“Danny’s affairs are her own, and mine,” she said carefully, plucking a tissue to wipe her smeared lipstick. “Though we value your protection, I’ll thank you not to judge where you do not understand.” Where Armida did not understand, either--Louisa was a closed book in so many ways, and she’d never seen her in the attitudes Danny’s mind held.

She'd coveted those memories, stolen them and turned them over and over in the privacy of her mind - half of them taken without Danny's knowledge, just as when she'd stolen into Lestat's libraries. 

The face looking back in the mirror was a wreck, blood flaking from her pale features and clotting in her hair. The clean face was the same that had walked the streets of Venice, too-large eyes and round cheeks forever playing the child (how she had hated Louisa's little blond escort on sight, something angry and bleak kindled in her before she even looked into his mind). 

"Of course," Maria was so mild, uninterested. "That look suits you." 

Silence fell again,  _ Tell me, _ something in Armida's mind said. It whispered under her skin, tingling with the still healing wounds. Unfulfilled. Aching, like the pathetic wreck she was.

She picked up a comb from the vanity, trying in vain to comb the drying blood from her eternally sleek and shining curls. It stuck and snarled, determined to have its course. As filthy as when she'd lived in the dust and muck of the catacombs, convinced Satan's eye was on her. Now…

Maria wasn't looking at her at all, head tipped back in the water. Armida felt herself coming unmoored, Danny's absence only now truly seeming real. She saw, clear as always, the night she and Louisa had parted--the empty, disinterested look Louisa and given her, and the knowledge that her despair approached. But the feeling, black and molded-soft, she no longer remembered. Or she had always felt this way, plucked it out of the memory's frame and swallowed it whole. 

Cautious, but not sure what of, she picked up a cloth and knelt at the edge of the bath--attendant to a goddess, like something out of a painting. The once-beloved muse. 

"Indulging in nostalgia?" Maria smiled. Armida remembered that, too--that first night, still dizzy from the swoon as Maria lowered her into the water and washed away the color of the brothel, the sourness of her bruises. She'd been happy there. Cared for. She was almost sure of it.   
  
Danny had been sweet to treat so; Louisa, a puzzle. Where Danny fought, Louisa allowed all things, and Armida's gifts of tenderness had felt cheapened by such permissiveness. No sense to that, but there it was.

"My memories are what they are." Those she kept, at any rate; there were holes and blank spots, had been even when Maria came to her and uplifted her from that place. Had, perhaps, been more later, after the fires and the darkness. The hunger. "They fill me, and I see again what once was. I remember you in that bronze tub, with your hair twisted about three paintbrushes. I carried many buckets, the steam making red my knuckles and the heat putting sweat on my skin. And still you were cold when you pulled me in and admired the transparence of my shift."

"Indeed. A long time ago, that place and that girl. She was a precious piece of art." Maria shifted, sending the water lapping along her arching collarbones. "A shame that she is lost to me now."

_ I am lost to myself, _ Armida thought.  _ I know not who to be, for my love hates me and I am adrift. _ Better Danny hate her than die. So she'd told herself from the moment she bundled her onto that plane, stench of slow death filling her nostrils. Better Danny hate her and fear her and leave her than die, and the things they'd done tonight were just another way of ensuring such.

"Artists recreate the past. Isn't that so?" She had nothing. She didn't know what needed to replace it, even as she set the cloth aside and slid into the water. "All those portraits..." Nymphs and sprites and tender sacrifices to great uncaring gods, Armida had modeled them all--in the main rooms and in the dark, every part of her a display. 

"Great artists bring life to bygone eras." Maria scooped handfuls of water to pour over her hair, their skin never touching as blood tinted the water. "The leave their stamp on what others have abandoned, to be pondered by new ages." 

Masters and fledglings. Secrets given only sparingly. "Is it so hard to take up the brush, when you yourself abandoned it?"

"So eager. Is an hour the span of your fortitude, after those 'five hundred years?'"

"I was never chaste, nor reluctant. No shy, blushing creature you bought." She'd not felt pleasure before Maria, but she'd lost her inhibitions long since. The week they kept her without food, just before her purchase and that first burning kiss, had blasted all thought of defiance from her mind.

She had been chosen at the perfect time. Such coincidence--

"No, I suppose not. Despite all my efforts." Maria tutted, tilting Armida's (Amanda's? Andrea's?) chin up to scrub a thumb over her cheekbone, working free a caked-on smear.

"And those years were not my choice, Maestra." Daring defiance, childishly tart tongue, but she had little to fear from a switching. Not after what had already gone this night. "If you knew I lived, while I thought you dead, you cannot resent the lack of my presence."

"It was not your distance that robbed me of my girl. Only my own folly, seeking to make what was never there."

"They have a saying about that these days. I think it was similar when you lived." She drew her knees up to her chest. Still bony, still thin, the hair burned away before her death. 

"Caveat emptor," Maria finished. "More fool I, to think I might make a silk purse from a sow's ear. We could trade such platitudes all night, with that tongue of yours. It would only serve my point." 

"You chose a child to play a gentlewoman? More fool you." And yet she leaned into those hands as they rubbed circles along her scalp. 

"All but grown, as i recall. you were very insistent." 

She'd have said anything to feel needed, no longer at home with the apprentices and yet held at arm's length by her mistress. Unwanted. Just, it seemed, as she was now. "Can you no longer paint me as you'd like?" As much a plea as a barb.

"The company you keep has always been vulgar, my dear." More water, hot and pink. "Skulking about with those empty-headed cultists after all I taught you. Spreading their misguided messages."

"You told me nothing." Her eyes squeezed shut. "It was all that kept me alive."

"As I knew it might. But I wasn't speaking of our king. I taught you what it meant to be a vampire, and still you embraced their barbarism. You would still be there, were it not for our Prince."

Lestat. Always it came back to Lestat.

"Lestat destroys what she does not believe in. What she cannot hold." Armida knew all that by heart, both from the destruction she'd endured and the years she'd spent touching Louisa's mind. She'd drowned herself in memories of the women's unholy union, looking for the key or pattern that would open not just Louisa's easy body and mind, but her closed, dead heart.

She'd never found the answer, but Lestat's rages and confusions had all been clear enough.

"And you accede to it. Not an altogether terrible trait, submission, but to do so in service to a lie rather than seeking truth..." cluck of tongue, and Maria pulled her skull in to press their foreheads together. "You pretend only, my beloved mistake. I love you, but hold no more illusions that you are what I wanted."

_ Let's pretend, _ the little girl in the story had said, and nothing after had made sense no matter how many times Armida made Louisa read it and explain the chess and the infant pigs. The queens and knights. But it had calmed her woman, sometimes, to read those children's stories with Armida curled upon her lap. Alice and Wendy and Dorothy Gale, and nonsense all.

"What, then,  _ do _ you want? One empty-headed and stupid? A shell?"

"I mourn that I was kept from you a century ago. You let a fine creature slip from your grasp." 

They needn't share minds for Armida to know whom she meant. Louisa was their Helen, beloved by all who fell under her spell. "She appeals to you? The only one colder than me?" Soft and fragile in body, a husk in spirit. 

"It's no failing of hers that you were not skilled enough to draw out her passions, my child. I warned you what an incautious hand can make of art." For a moment Armida felt herself cradled, and then she was pushed away as Maria continued. "That woman is a strange one. Pliant, yet unyielding in her desire for truth."

A woman. Almost ten years Armida's senior by shape alone. Matched, with her soft, broad hips and full breasts, a womb that had borne life. Not like unfinished, unwanted Armida, with her swollen chest and narrow hips, half-bitten nails and still-round face.  "Lestat would fight you for her," was all she said. 

"Our Prince has laid her claim, as though such things can last among our kind. But it doesn't matter. I have no need to sweep in like some wicked beast. I will be here when she comes to me, however it may happen."

And it  _ would _ happen. Louisa was neither chaste nor constant, swayed not by her own nonexistent passions but by the power of those stronger (which was everyone, now. She'd never refuse again, so long as her graceful flashing throat and large eyes continued to inspire desire.) Sooner, later, over the years Maria would one day chance upon that creature which Armida had been forced to abandon, and Maria would own it.

She left Maria there in the water, running yet another cycle of hot as though it would warm dead flesh, and Maria allowed it.

'In the fullness of time,' Armida had heard some say. Time had been empty to her, bringing only tedium interrupted periodically by bursts of terror. But when she had a woman, it became full; and she needed that, desperately. Needed something deep, to know she was not always to be so alone.

It would come. It always came, or she forced it to happen; a girl like her survived.

Her pretty dress was destroyed, but no matter. She had been a model, so long ago--to put it gently. All knew the true profession of an odalisque. She knew how to fold, drape, and tie a fine Egyptian cotton sheet to form a khiton (Artemis, she'd posed, sworn from men, before her breasts grew too large for the athletic goddess). Her sandals would serve, and she feared no violence from mortals.

She walked out to the street just in front of the hotel, confident she'd soon have a ride back to her own, and a meal with it. And a sports car, too, for her to learn to drive.

She would never be alone for long, vulgar though the company was.


End file.
